Game of Thrones Star Emilia Clarke Is the Sexiest Woman Alive

Call off the search! Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of Meereen, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, Protector of the Realm, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, called Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, Mother of Dragons on HBO’s fantasy mega-hit Game of Thrones, has been named Esquire magazine’s “Sexiest Woman Alive” for 2015.

That’s right. Of all the women alive, the 28-year-old, London-born beauty is the sexiest, based on Esquire’s extensive research. Working tirelessly since Penélope Cruz was named 2014’s sexiest woman, the brave explorers of Esquire have finally found a new, and perhaps even sexier, woman. Amazing that, of all the women on this lonely planet of ours, it just happened to be the dragon lady from TV.

Of course, they looked everywhere. They scoured the beaches of Mozambique, hacked through jungles in Ecuador, peered into the Forbidden City, helicoptered over Petra. They took bumpy boat rides to the Faroe Islands, surveyed the narrow streets of Vilnius. They rounded the Cape of Good Hope, binoculars pressed to their faces, searching, madly, for the ever elusive sexiest woman alive. And they saw many contenders. Would it be the lonely barmaid in faraway Rotorua? That red-haired hiker they saw scrambling around Tierra del Fuego? The beautiful woman one Esquire correspondent observed crying alone on the observation deck of the CN Tower?

No, it would be Emilia Clarke, bewigged teen princess of Meereen. Of all the lands they picked over—rattling in Land Cruisers across the Gobi, skirting along Bhutan’s edges in a skiff bobbing up the choppy Manas River, mushing on dogsleds through the deep snows outside Nuuk—they eventually went with a great beauty from a place that doesn’t really exist. Does that tell us something about our culture, that we prefer fantasy to reality? I don’t know! Maybe it does. Of course, Emilia Clarke is a real person, from a real place, but we mostly know her as a fake person from a very fake place. So who’s to say what ultimately swayed Esquire to Clarke. Obviously there is a science to it, but there is also a human element, some slight or bias that influenced this most monumental of decisions.

Agree or not with the outcome, it would be foolish, immodest even, to question Esquire on this matter. Because we haven’t done the legwork that they have. Who among us has barged down the Nile, yelling “Show me your women!” into a bullhorn? Who has bicycled through rainy Chongqing, taking a photo of every woman they passed? Who has made a wobbly bush plane descent onto a remote Aleutian rock, a list of the island’s women clutched in hand? Only Esquire has. So we have to trust them. Emilia Clarke is the sexiest woman currently alive on planet Earth, out of all the women there are. And that’s just the way it is.